While everyone in the SharePoint field is writing about the new features of SP2013, we may want to remember that the organizations we work for are just looking for a solution to a work-related problem. Whether that is on SP2003 or 2013 is not really an issue for them, since they can only work with the platform they currently have. SP2013 has of course a couple of great new features, but I know that many day-to-day projects can be facilitated perfectly by an older version.
So I thought it would be time to show another example of a simple Team Site that has had a great impact on the business.

One of our most successful solutions of all time has been the Team Site we configured when we had won a large new customer in the US.

What was the situation?A fast food chain with about 3000 locations had bought our machinery. Before the machines could be installed, a third party plumbing agency had to fit water and electricity at each location. The information needs were:

For the fast food chain: progress – in how many locations had the new machines been installed and when would the project be finished?

For the plumbing agency: planning and progress – where were the locations and how was plumbing proceeding – were there any issues?

For us: planning and progress – which locations were ready to receive the machines, and in which locations were the machines installed?

Until then, the normal process was to send an Excel sheet back and forth. Every party would update this every day and send around again. Of course all parties stored every version in their own archives.
For smaller projects it was workable, but it frequently happened that it was not clear if any document was the latest version. This was a much larger rollout than we normally had, so our Sales Team asked us if we could create a more robust process to manage this project.

What is the solution?An external Team Site was set up for all 3 parties.

The customer added a list of all locations, including address details, telephone numbers and local manager. This Location List could only be edited by the customer.

The plumbing agency used this list as a pick list to schedule their work in the Work List. This list was the backbone for progress reporting and it could be edited by the plumbing agency and ourselves.
Each location had one of the following statuses:

Waiting for inspection

Ready for installation

Inspected-minor issues

Inspected-major issues

Machine installed

When the status was “2. Ready for Installation” our Sales Team could install the machinery. The Work List therefore also served as our work supply and our status update.

Editing the Work List by the plumbing agency and ourselves

We created various views to enable every party to see the items they needed in an optimal way. Several managers set an Alert to the Work List to know how the project was progressing.

Different views of the Work List

We also added some real-time graphs to show progress. Every day the 3 parties had to update the list before a certain time. A daily conference call followed to discuss any issues.

What are the benefits?

Because the Work List was the only version of the truth there was no discussion about versions or status. This made the calls very focused and effective.

The views allowed all parties to see only the relevant items.

The Alerts and the real-time graphs kept everyone informed, so there was no need for additional progress reporting to management.

At the completion of the project, our customer complimented our team with the effective way they had handled this. We later heard that they requested the same process when they had a rollout with another supplier.

But also internally the success of this process was clear. It became standard procedure to use a similar setup for every large implementation. And because we learned with every rollout, the Team Sites were created better and faster each time.

I can not say this often enough: it does not require a rocket scientist to do this. All it needs is a bit of straightforward process thinking, creativity and two SharePoint lists. It did not even need SharePoint 2013 :-).